Agile Adoption: Key Challenges to Scaling Up : Page 2

Organizations transitioning to Agile software development face many common challenges. In most cases, automation can help overcome them.

by Anders Wallgren

Mar 19, 2012

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Agile Adoption Challenge #3: Lack of Standardized Processes

No matter how rigid an organization may be, software development teams always find ways to personalize their routines, systems and tools. This means every piece of software they deliver is created using a unique, non-repeatable process. Geographically dispersed teams tend to compound this problem.

Creating a standardized approach that allows for heterogeneity can be a simple fix for this issue. Automation makes it easy to provide a centralized, standardized approach for disseminating and re-using common procedures and workflows. This makes life easier for users and administrators, and allows for easy sharing of best practices.

It's also important, though, to recognize that unique approaches are inherent to modern application software development and ensure that standard organizational tools allow for flexibility. That way, developers can use the platforms and development environments that work best for them.

Agile Adoption Challenge #4: Process Analysis and Optimization

The specialized nature of application software development means that in any given organization, only a handful of people really understand what happens in the entire build-test-deploy process. One-off manual processes, so prevalent in today's development, add to the challenge by limiting input capture and analysis.

Automating the way data is tracked and reported throughout the build-test-deploy cycle allows the easy capture and summarization of information for anyone from developers to executives. Automatically keeping track of critical information makes it easier to identify and fix bottlenecks, errors and other complications that can sabotage Agile implementation.

Agile Adoption Is Worth the Effort

Many organizations today are moving toward Agile, but trying to implement Agile on a large scale without automation will be a frustrating endeavor for all involved. In order to take advantage of the accuracy and speed promised by Agile techniques, automation is absolutely necessary. The result -- better software built faster than ever before -- is well worth it.

Anders Wallgren is Chief Technical Officer of Electric Cloud. Anders has over 15 years of in-depth experience designing and building commercial software. Prior to joining Electric Cloud, Anders held executive positions at Aceva, Archistra, and Impresse. Anders also held management positions at Macromedia (MACR), Common Ground Software and Verity (VRTY), where he played critical technical leadership roles in delivering award-winning technologies such as Macromedia's Director 7 and various Shockwave products.